The Creation of the Modern Incel
Image description: A grainy, monochrome sepia image of a giant Frankenstein’s monster strapped down to a diagonal-leaning board. A shadowy figure of a human man stands at the back. “The Creation of a Modern Incel written by Jessie Pyo” in bold, light pink text.
“The tyrants only want slaves, and the sensualists only want toys.
[And] sensualists have been the most dangerous tyrants.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The term incel is a shortening of “involuntary celibate,” first coined in 1997 by a Canadian woman named Alana (last name unknown) who intended to use the word to describe “anybody of any gender who was lonely, never had sex or who had not been in a relationship for a long time for whatever reason.” In their article “Rise of the Incel Community,” university student Farshad Labbaf noted that this was also originally what Alana called the members of her online support group, which she created as a way to find the emotional connection that this community lacked. Nevertheless, the term quickly Frankenstein-ed into an identification for disillusioned, (predominantly) white cisheterosexual men who combine their “misogynistic rhetoric” and “shared sense of victimhood” into promoting extreme violence against women, to the point where even Alana was eventually ostracized and kicked out of the online group. Modern incel ideology is characterized by racism, homophobia, and a hatred towards women, as well as sexually active men who were thus perceived as “alpha males.” Perhaps most significantly, it is powered by an intense self-loathing — incels take out their insecurities on those who are vulnerable, with the most extremist incels going on to commit murder, mass shootings and other similar hate crimes.
Frankenstein’s creature, who has been popularly characterized as a brainless, zombie-like being, has undergone a sort of cultural makeover in modern literary circles. Once the terrifying antagonist, many readers of the novel have now come to claim him as a victim of his circumstances instead: a poor, lost soul, abandoned by his maker and rightfully angry as such. Although I occasionally felt sympathy for the creature through my own reading of Frankenstein, I hesitated against blinding following this zeitgeist. With all of his anger, irrationality and violent tendencies, the self-absorbed creature reminded me less of a fallen angel and more of a modern-day incel.
A modern term incel may be, but in no way is it a modern idea. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), founding feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (and Mary Shelley’s mother) discussed the concept of man as either tyrant or sensualist: men who kept women from education in order to control them, or men who did the same in order to keep them as subservient, sexual slaves. Wollstonecraft criticized famous Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one such sensualist who denied women the right to be educated, wanting only “a coquettish slave,… a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man [for] whenever he chooses to relax himself.” Incels both look down on women and lust after them in a contradictory manner. Even now, a standard belief in incel ideology is the desire that the world will return to a “paradise lost” (17) where women were uneducated, focused on being wives and mothers, and were vessels that allowed men to “obtain sex from [them] whenever they please.” Although Wollstonecraft died soon after her baby was born, Mary Shelley grew up devotedly reading her mother’s work and considered many of her ideas when crafting her novel Frankenstein (1818); not only does the primary female character Elizabeth act as this docile, born-bride for Victor Frankenstein, but the infamous creature represents this prototypical incel with his disparaging views of women and self-pitying victim mindset.
However, an incel is not born, he is made — as Victor brought the creature into being, he committed the act of ‘birthing’ a child and became its parent. Unfortunately, unable to fathom this burden, he subsequently abandons the Creature and leaves him to his own devices. While the creature manages to survive and even learns to read and communicate, there is something he knows he is fundamentally lacking. Scholar Hannah Jackson argues that the “absence of a healthy parent-child relationship” (51) is what causes the creature to turn into a vengeful monster, just the way that unhappy relationships with parents and family can lead children to become lonely and resentful. Citing attachment theorists who assert that “love and affection from [a caregiver] is important for the healthy development of a child” (59), Jackson contends that creature “lack[s] any source of affection” and is unable to find these emotional necessities in humans, who are hostile and reject him. Proper and supportive caregivers must be the ones to teach their children social lessons: to be kind, relate to others, and regulate their emotions. The creature, of course, is not given these foundational early-life interactions, and thus is unable to interact with society properly, leading to the social gap that leads these children to be ostracized.
The creature attempts to inherit these socialization skills as he essentially stalks the De Lacey family, made up of a blind father and his two children. They live in poverty in rural France, and the creature watches their day-to-day life as Agatha, the daughter, does the household chores and Felix, the son, works to support his family. Observing them for months whilst hiding in their barn, he begins to understand what familial love is, noting that as Felix and Agatha take care of their old father, their father rewards them with his affection and appreciation. The siblings are very loving to each other as well, and the creature develops a parasocial relationship with the De Laceys as he realizes that he does not have a family unit of his own. He develops a particular fixation with Felix — in the “healthy parent-child relationship” that Jackson describes, Felix plays both roles: he defers to his father as the head of the house, treating him with respect and admiration, while also acting as the paternal role, protecting his family members and taking responsibility for them. Felix thus represents everything that the creature cannot have and cannot be. His ‘father,’ Victor, has abandoned and scorned him, and in doing so, has taken away the right for the creature to be a loving ‘son.’ Much like an incel who forces one-sided attachments upon other people, the creature grows desperate to become a member of the family and forcibly enters their cottage while the old man is alone, planning to win the favor of the sole person who cannot judge him by his monstrous appearance. Nevertheless, Felix and Agatha panic when they see such a horrific creature cornering their vulnerable father and the creature loses control immediately becoming violent at their rejection, and their reaction is proven correct anyway. This spurning from the family he idolized is what ultimately turns the creature on his path of violence: giving up on joining society, he decides to take revenge on humanity for rejecting him by killing innocent people. Starting with Victor’s adolescent younger brother, the creature cruelly murders his lover Elizabeth and his best friend Henry as well. Thus, Jackson’s argument emphasizes that the lack of parent-led nurturing and familial love is at the forefront of what the monster has become: vengeful, aggressive, and seeking control through any means.
Moreover, the creature’s incel tendencies are exhibited through his vicious and homicidal actions, as well as his entitlement to women. Frankenstein’s monster exhibits the most clichéd of incel delusions: the naïvety that getting a girlfriend will fix all of your problems. He demands of Victor to create him a female creature who will, ostensibly, cure his loneliness and suffering through her existence: one whom he can live with “in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for [his] being” (Ch. IX, Vol. II). He is the sensualist that Wollstonecraft speaks of, and like Rousseau, it is not a pure love that he desires but a slave to obediently love him. The creature bemoans his own desolate reality, hideous appearance, and lack of connection to others, but fails to even consider (or perhaps does not care) that this hypothetical female, with all these same founding attributes, will be just as miserable as he. In true incel fashion, he has given up on the notion that his life could be bettered, perhaps through self-love, and instead only wants to drag others into the pits of wretchedness with him. The contradiction lies in that the creature asks Victor to give him an “equal” that he can relate to while simultaneously dismissing any sort of personhood that the hypothetical female creature might come to inhabit. She does not even exist, and yet he still denies her anything — he tells Victor that the female creature will exist under his lead, away from humanity, and that she will be naturally “content” with the life he chooses for them to live. In this way, he is denying the female access to education: By keeping her away from people, the source of where he gained his knowledge, she will not be able to develop her own mind and reason.
Interestingly, the one who does consider the idea that the female creature might have her own dispositions is the parent, Victor himself. Victor at least seems to understand that personhood forms regardless of external oppression. When working in his laboratory, he reflects on the capricious nature of the original creature and what it could mean if he creates a second rendition. His reasoning is relatively sound: if the original creature could learn to think and reason, the female creature could also do this. She might “refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (Ch. I, Vol. 3). And if the original creature “loathes his deform[ities]” so much, not only might he despise these same deformities found in the female, the female could find him just as disgusting and choose to leave him. Regardless of his strange, hypersexual view of this hypothetical female (Victor also immediately turns to the concern that the female and the male might get along too well and fill the world with an army of their demonic reproductions), he offers some consideration that the female creature has agency. This is what ultimately turns him away from creating her — he understands that despite the original creature’s insistence that the female will live subordinate to him, there is no guarantee that the female will blindly agree to what he demands of her.
Victor’s rejection of the creature’s demands is a metaphorical rejection from the female — a lasting impression of her independent personhood — and in the same way that real life incels do, the creature responds with rage. Indeed, in his 1935 movie adaptation Bride of Frankenstein, director James Whale appears to have considered this aspect of a true rejection of the original creature from a legitimized female one. In the film, Victor is coerced into completing his making of the female (the titular “bride” is born not as an independent being but directly as the mate of the original), who, at her “birth,” is faced with the creature and screams in horror. Heartbroken by this response, the monster sheds a tear, but then pulls a lever that destroys the laboratory in a gruesome murder-suicide, telling her that they together “belong dead.” The female is not even alive for a few minutes before she is killed by the one who demanded her creation. Again, much like with the Da Lacey family, his immediate reaction to rejection is violence, and although the movie ends with their demise, this rejection in the novel is what spurs the creature’s toward his final path of terror and revenge.
In (some) defense of the creature, this is not to say that his incel-like ideology and behaviors are entirely his fault. He was not the total irredeemable monster that Victor believes he is, and his confusion about his self-identity and the intense pain he experiences from constant, harsh rejection is genuinely sympathetic. When he asks Victor why he formed a “monster so hideous that even [his creator] turned from [him] in disgust” (Ch. VII, Vol. II), it is a heart-wrenching, weighty question. The creature’s initial curiosity and floundering lack of knowledge of the world was reminiscent of a child, and it cannot help but be wondered what kind of being he would have grown into if it were not for Victor’s utter neglect. If he had been treated with kindness by others, properly socialized and nurtured with sympathy, he could have been good. However, just as how the creature is also not the brainless, grunting monster that popular culture prefers to portray him as, these young, modern-day incel-identifying boys are also not simply under the will of their impulses. They fully choose to indulge in this harmful, misogynistic ideology and spearhead these violent atrocities. It is a thin line to walk: I do believe that these men have been failed by their parents and guardians, and that our society has pushed them into these negative spaces, even allowing for this hatred to thrive. But how far can they be excused? When young men commit extreme acts of violence, especially against their families and other vulnerable parties can we say that this is just a condition of their upbringing? What about the young women who experience the same neglect from parents and bullying from peers and societal loneliness, who do not become aggravated threats to society? What about the young men who do not fall down this incel pipeline, or do fall down and then pull themselves back out of it when they realize the harm? When Frankenstein’s monster killed, he killed out of vindictive anger. His first victim was a child, his next a woman. He considered himself a “fallen angel,” betrayed, and in his fury at his parent, he murdered unrelated individuals, acting as if he were a god with the right to take lives. I will not say that the creature is not some sort of victim in his own right, but ultimately, this does not excuse the pain he inflicts onto other innocent people in violent and disturbing ways.
